Poolparty feature feedback

[Cameron Pope]

Hello -

First of all I want to say that I've really enjoyed working with
poolparty - I can see tremendous value in the ability to define
infrastructure declaratively. After using it for a few months, I have
a few thoughts (all of which I am happy to contribute in the form of
patches) on some improvements to poolparty. I wanted to open a dialog
in case others have some ideas as well.

1) Confirmation when shutting down cloud(s) - after we had brought a
fairly large pool of servers online, one of my partners, new to
poolparty sat down at the computer and typed 'cloud terminate'. Given
the command syntax of poolparty, it shut down every single server. The
first time that happened, it was funny. The second time, not so much.

2) Ability to specify the version of chef. Chef has some major changes
between version 7 and 8, also since it is in active development,
sometimes a gem gets released that breaks something. It's important to
use a known version of chef, when using it to provision a machine.

3) non-optional cloud name parameter. I find myself wanting to do
things like 'cloud start database', 'cloud terminate app
load_balancer', 'cloud bootstrap test_environment', cloud terminate
all. Since almost every action implies some cloud(s) the convention is
generally not to make them options.

Also, has anyone been able to build and use the version of poolparty
at the HEAD of the master branch on github? I haven't been able to get
it to work. (I get one set of errors on ruby 1.9 - PLATFORM constant
not defined, and a different set of errors on ruby 1.8 - String.lines
not defined). I'm happy to dig into the problem, but I wanted to make
sure I'm not doing anything obviously wrong.

Thanks,
Cameron